A derelict ship from Red Dwarf's history bears not only much-needed supplies for the crimson short one but also a most unwelcome surprise. Turns out the holovirus aboard was made on the Dwarf. I CAN'T ACCESS REVIEWS; please email them to me.

Disclaimer: Red Dwarf
and all related characters and indicia belong to Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, and
possibly to the Beeb, not to me. Really. If I had
them, would I be doing this? I think not.

Full Circle

"What the
smeg is that?"

It looked,
Lister thought, like nothing so much as a banged-up T-95 Headhunter, the sort
of small transport craft used around the shuttle bases for taxi service—only
something seemed to have tried its damnedest to bite the ship in half. Kryten
tapped out commands on the consoles, and a couple of wireframe models appeared
on the screens, turning clockwise.

"It appears
to be a derelict spacecraft, sirs," said the mechanoid, typing. "Just
scanning—yes—reading no lifeforms at all aboard. Just space
debris." He gave them a lipless grin.

Lister
frowned and slouched back in his seat, popping the top off another can of
Leopard. "Where'd it come from? We're three million years out in deep
space...who around here is going to be flying shuttlecraft?"

"Are there
any supplies on board, Kryten?" Rimmer was leaning against the Drive Room
doorway, arms folded. "Not that it matters to me, of course, but certain persons who shall remain nameless used
up the last of the X-cell batteries to run their robot goldfish." He gave
Lister a pointed look, which was met with blank preoccupation.

"Er,
re-scanning," said Kryten. Lister reached the end of his train of thought, got
off, and stood on the platform for a moment.

Rimmer's
nostrils flared. "Just what I'd expect, Listy, your mind's firmly in the
gutter. I happen to require X-cells
for a new totally top secret experiment that I'm experimenting with. Secretly."

"You," said
Lister, crushing the can against his forehead, "are a
smeghead, Rimmer. Well, Kryte? Got any good news?"

The
mechanoid turned to them. "It's absolutely fascinating, sirs. Apparently the
craft is registered to the Jupiter Mining Corporation. It's one of our own
shuttlecraft, lost three million years ago when the crew got wiped out."

"Wait,"
said Lister. "So it was outside the Dwarf
when the drive plate exploded, and it just drifted until now? What're the odds
that we've come across it now?"

Holly's face
appeared on the monitor screen. "Two hundred and sixty-three
million to one, Dave."

Lister gave
her a weary look. "Fanks, Hol. Well? Anything useful, or do we just chalk this
up to the "would you believe this" file and go to bed?"

"The ship
appears to contain some basic supplies," Kryten said. "The original manifest
lists the entire second season of Buffy
the Vampire Slayer on disc."

"Brutal,"
said Lister. "We go aboard."

Rimmer
rolled his eyes. "Oh, well. I suppose I can put off my very important plans for
tonight so that you can dribble over some puerile twenty-first century telly
series featuring a stunningly beautiful blonde girl in tight leather pants.
Really, I don't know why I bother with you, Listy, I really don't."

**

Lister woke
up, clutching a pillow; he'd been in the middle of a particularly successful
dream, and it took him a few minutes to realize that the pillow was not, in
fact, who he thought it was. He shoved it aside and squinted at the clock,
which read 3:14 AM.

"What the
smeg...?" he asked, aloud, and then realized what had woken him. There was a
soft, miserable noise coming from the lower bunk.

Lister
rolled over and peered over the edge of the bunk, locks hanging almost to the
floor, and made out the form of Rimmer curled in a knot facing the wall,
shivering.

Lister
raised an upside-down eyebrow. "Lights," he said, and Holly lit the sleeping
quarters. Eyes squinched almost shut against the sudden illumination, Lister
stared at his bunkmate. "Rimmer?" he said, after a while. "Rimmer, what the
smeg is up with you?"

Rimmer
didn't move; he was lying huddled against the back wall of the bunk, shoulders
shaking. Every now and then he would emit a soft moan.

Lister
rolled back onto his own bunk and scowled at the ceiling. He didn't
particularly want to get up; in fact, what he really wanted was to wiggle his
way back into the dream he'd been enjoying, but as long as Rimmer was
whimpering like a recently-kicked puppy, that wasn't gonna happen. He heaved a
long, put-upon sigh and vaulted out of the bunk.

"Rimmer,
wake up," he said,
loudly. "You're having a nightmare or something, man."

No
response. He leaned over and cupped his hands around his mouth as a megaphone.
"Wake up, you gimboid," he demanded.

Still no response. Okay, time to bring out the big guns. "Yo, Bonehead!"

Rimmer
jerked awake and rolled over, gasping, eyes huge. Lister squinted at him: there
must be something wrong with his lightbee or something, because he looked even
paler than usual, and the shadows around his eyes looked bruised.

"What did
you call me?" he rasped.

"Nothin',"
said Lister. "You were having a nightmare, man. Woke me up
out of a perfectly good dream."

Rimmer
shivered and pulled the covers over himself more tightly. "Oh," he said.
"Sorry."

Lister
vaulted back up into his own bunk and told Holly to kill the lights. As he was
drifting off, arms wrapped around Sarah Michelle Pillow, it vaguely occurred to
him that it was completely against everything Rimmer stood for to apologize to
him. Especially after "Bonehead."

Oh well, he thought drowsily. What the smeg.

**

"Yeeeeeoooooowwwww!" The Cat danced into the living
quarters' dining room, resplendent in canary-yellow moire silk with black
lapels. "Am I lookin' good, or am I lookin' good?
Any more handsome and they'd have to raise me to sainthood!"

Lister
looked up from his breakfast (five samosas, six extra-spicy poppadoms with
unidentifiable red sauce, and a six-pack of Leopard) and grinned. "What're you
so chuffed about, Cat?"

"I ain't
seen goalpost-head once today! That's a personal record!"

Lister sat
back, chewing. "Hey, you're right. He was still asleep when I got up, and that
was about two in the afternoon. It's not like him."

"Hey, who
cares?" The Cat moonwalked over to the food dispenser and demanded fish; he
joined Lister at the table and began to chant his food-taunting ritual. Lister
ate a samosa with a meditative air.

"No, think
about it, man. He's normally up at ten, I mean, the crack of dawn. And he charges around the sleeping
quarters making all the noise he possibly can and humming his stupid theme tune
to himself before going off to find someone else to cheese off."

"So, he's
decided to sleep in. So what?" The Cat flipped his
salmon off the plate, caught it backhanded before it hit the floor, and growled
at it. "Nothin' gets away from this
cat, little fishie." He gave Lister an enormous white grin and sank his teeth
into the fish with evident delight. Lister pushed away his empty plate and lit
a cigarette, ignoring the uncharacteristic flicker of concern for the hologram.

"I'm going
down the cinema," he said. "For once it'll be nice to watch me films without
Rimmer sneering down me neck."

"Buddy, that is one image I did not need."

Kryten
hummed the theme from Androids to
himself as he minced along the hallways, hoovering the space dust that
collected in the corners of bulkheads, polishing doorplates, occasionally
allowing himself a pause to apply Jiffy Windo-Kleen to a particularly dirty
rivet-head. Times like this, when he was alone with the surfaces and the
cleaning materials, when all there was in the universe was him and his
duty—well, these were the best times of Kryten's life.

He swept a
feather-duster along the edges of the door to Lister and Rimmer's quarters before
palming the door-lock open and stepping inside. He'd taken to doing his main
cleaning rounds now, in the middle of the afternoon, because it was the main
time when both Lister and Rimmer were likely to be elsewhere—not underfoot, not
complaining that their boxer shorts shouldn't bend or that their collection of
Napoleon's war diaries had been filed in alphabetic, rather than chronological,
order. Which is why it came as some surprise to him when a
weak voice from the lower bunk disturbed him mid-clean.

"Mr.
Rimmer, sir?" he asked, getting up and retracting his groinal floor-waxer
attachment. "Mr. Rimmer, is there anything the matter?"

Rimmer,
still in bri-nylon pyjamas, was lying huddled on his side in his bunk.
Hologramatic sweat sheened his face and throat. His eyes were dilated so far
only a thin ring of hazel had escaped the black. He was shivering. Perhaps most
telling, he no longer looked as if something unpleasant was trying to crawl up
his nostrils; his normal expression had been replaced by one of weary pain.

Sixty
percent of Rimmer's typical look of petulant annoyance flickered across his
features. "I'm just peachy, Kryten,"
he rasped. "What time is it?"

"Half past
three in the afternoon, sir," said Kryten, his brow ridges furrowed. "Can I get
you anything?"

Rimmer sat
up, after a couple of attempts, and pulled a blanket round his shoulders. "You
can tell me what the smeg was on that ship, Kryten. I feel like a mining juggernaut's
run over me, and the stupid room won't stop going around....it's worse than the
time Lister got me drunk and then downloaded eight months of his smegging
memory into my core program, and that's including
the triple fried-egg chilli chutney sandwich." He coughed, painfully. "Well?
Go! Get scanning, you novelty-condom-headed lavatory attendant...."

Kryten
watched as his eyes rolled up in his head and he slumped back to the pillows,
let a few moments elapse, and turned to the monitor. "Holly? I believe we have a situation."

In the
cinema, Lister was watching It's A Wonderful Life for the 40, 362th time and ingesting an
obscenely large amount of popcorn. The film had got to the part where George
Bailey is begging for a loan from the evil bespectacled bank man, and Lister
was amusing himself by flicking popcorn husks at the screen every time the evil
bespectacled bank man appeared. There was quite a large heap of husks below the
screen.

"Well," the
evil bespectacled bank man was saying, "do you have any collateral for this
loan?"

"No."

"Any assets at all?"

"N---Dave?
Sorry to cut in," said Holly, who had suddenly replaced Bedford
Falls on the screen, "but we've got
a bit of a problem."

"We're
thinking about that right now," Holly told him. He got up, tucking his popcorn
under his arm, and headed back up to the living quarters with a resigned
expression on his face.

Rimmer was awake, lying on one of the medical bay's couches, by the
time Lister arrived. He looked like hell, worse than Lister had felt when he'd
caught mutated pneumonia in the officers' quarters a couple years ago. Kryten
had got Holly to produce a hologramatic flannel, which he was wringing in cold
water and smoothing over Rimmer's forehead.

"Hey, man,"
said Lister, quietly. "How you feeling?"

"Smegging
awful," Rimmer rasped. "This is all your fault,
Lister. You just had to board that
derelict yesterday, didn't you. Just had to expose the entire crew to god knows
what horrible alien plagues." He coughed painfully. "Well done, Listy.
Operation Make Rimmer Miserable is a complete success."

Lister
sighed. "Look, Rimmer, man, the ship scanned clean. I wouldn't have gone aboard
if there had been any reason to think it was dangerous."